A United Group of Lesbian Activists Forms a Strong and Supportive Community
A Collaborative Ode to Queer Artistic Legacy: “arms ache avid aeon” at Participant Inc
A rare synthesis of personal practice and collective history, the exhibition arms ache avid aeon: Nancy Brooks Brody / Joy Episalla / Zoe Leonard / Carrie Yamaoka: fierce pussy amplified: Chapter Eight offers a profoundly moving and formally resonant meditation on art, identity, and enduring friendships. Curated by Jo-ey Tang and currently on view at Participant Inc in Manhattan’s Lower East Side until May 11, 2024, the show reflects on both the individual careers and the shared legacy of four core members of the feminist art collective fierce pussy.
Introducing fierce pussy
Originally formed in 1991 during the height of the AIDS crisis, fierce pussy rose out of the urgency of queer activism and the need for lesbian visibility. Fusing art with political protest, the collective was known for wheat-pasting posters in New York City, renaming streets after lesbian icons, and disseminating zines and stickers. Their work, often raw and immediate, transformed public space into a canvas for queer expression.
arms ache avid aeon moves away from the ephemeral urgency of those street-based interventions toward a more intimate and sustained dialogue between the artists themselves, both as individuals and as members of a chosen queer family. Rather than providing a straightforward retrospective of the group’s strategies and impact, the exhibition presents their personal artistic practices in subtle, deeply intertwined relationships.
An Immersive and Label-Free Encounter
Curator Jo-ey Tang has composed the show with deliberate openness. There are no wall labels; the artworks, spare and sometimes cryptic, are identified only in a handout at the gallery entrance. The format invites viewers to explore freely and embrace ambiguity—mirroring, perhaps, how queerness refuses fixed categorization and how deep relationships resist easy description.
This curatorial approach dissolves hierarchical distinctions between solo work and collective ethos. The lack of labels generates an interpretative limbo that requires attention and perhaps shared dialogue among visiting viewers—just as fierce pussy’s founding work relied on public participation and reclaiming public spaces.
Material Connections and Visual Dialogues
Throughout the gallery space, individual works by Nancy Brooks Brody, Joy Episalla, Zoe Leonard, and Carrie Yamaoka resonate with one another in texture, color, and conceptual form. For instance, Yamaoka’s “Overlay” (2024)—a translucent resin slab with hints of reflective film—occupies a charged proximity to Episalla’s “removed: 5 skins” (2001/2018/2024/2025), beige cotton and metal textile pieces splayed on the floor. The physical tension between these understated sculptures invites layered readings of memory, transformation, and bodily presence.
Yamaoka’s “14 by 11 (flake.swell)” (2024), abstract in style with frictive textures, intensifies Laurence’s nearby photographic work Tree + Fence, Out My Back Window (1998), drawing out a surprising interplay between natural and constructed environments. The formal rhythms in one artwork seem to echo or extend into the next, creating a porous arrangement between figuration and abstraction.
The late Nancy Brooks Brody’s pair of optical paintings titled “Glory Hole, (vibgyor)” (2012) serve as grounding anchors to the exhibition’s reflection on queer presence. “Vibgyor,” a mnemonic for the colors of the rainbow, signals the chromatic language of queer pride while “glory hole”—a term loaded with histories of furtive intimacy—adds a layer of sexual and affective charge. Brody’s paintings are both meditative and pulsing with coded significance, capturing queer sensibility as an unstable interplay between visibility and opacity.
A Poster from the Past, A Portal to the Present
In a graceful gesture that roots the show in fierce pussy’s activist past, one piece—distinct from the otherwise conceptual nature of the exhibition—is a take-away poster bearing the lyric “I got all my sisters with me” from Sister Sledge’s disco anthem “We Are Family.” This poster acts as a bridge between the group’s original street interventions and the current, quieter context of Participant Inc. Visitors are invited to take one home, extending the show’s spirit beyond the gallery into everyday life, sustaining its political lineage.
Intimacy as Method and Message
Unlike traditional retrospectives that enshrine artists as solitary geniuses, arms ache avid aeon insists on relationality. The works don’t “explain” each other, nor do they require decoding. What emerges is not a didactic representation of fierce pussy’s collaborative activism but a poetic illustration of care, influence, and shared aesthetic language. The exhibition’s lack of narrative spoon-feeding encourages active looking and contemplation—an invitation to enter a web of mutual regard.
Critic Alexis Clements, writing on Yamaoka’s recent curated show Exposure, observed that some exhibitions “turn in on themselves.” Tang’s curatorial approach